The CRAFT series is designed to walk you through preparing your team to be able to think outside of their typical creative boxes, walk humbly with their artistry, and use teamwork to produce massive amounts of creative development for their ministry. Over this series, we will walk you through different areas of creative development for you as the leader, and for your team. When we are finished, we will have worked through how to create, refine, and associate your art, and then how to take it forward and completely transcend your church culture to a whole new level of artistry
CRAFT // PART ONE: HANDLING A TEAM OF ARTISTS
Let’s get a few things out of the way at the very beginning. Artists (especially musicians) can be perfectionists. We see exactly how we want our musicianship to look like, but when we have someone tell us what that should look like, we tend to become very irate in our demeanor. Sometimes, to the point of having a prideful spirit. Pride is one of those things every musician has to work through. A worship leader or creative works in a very public and “entertainment” field within church work, and for us to remove all pride from our work can sometimes be quite the task. One of the things that we have to really work on when leading teams of creatives and musicians is to lead from a position where we have tons of humility, and absolutely zero pride.
While working with other worship and creative teams, I have learned that the best way to provide a church with a functioning creative working environment is by placing a creative with strong administration skills as the leader. Under them, all of your artists, graphic designers, and musicians. These creatives must have artistry and creativity far above their leader, but with a very submissive and humbling attitude. The artists or other creative must be supremely confident in their abilities, but be humble enough to follow the direction of their leader, even when that direction is in a completely different path of artistry or implementation.
If you are a leader of a creative group, the first step towards taking your church to the next level of their artistry is by removing any pride from their work. Find artists that have a willing and humble spirit about their work – but who have massive artistic talent. If your musicians and creatives are extremely talented, but need refinement, it’s your job to train and lead them in the ways fit for your church culture, and that organization must be structured top-down in a way that honors the creatives, the leaders and the leaders.
That organization chart should look something like this:
LEADER = Creative with High Administration Skills
||
||
||
||
CREATIVE MEMBER = Creative with High Artistic Skills + Giant Humility
TEAM = CREATIVE SUCCESS
I’ve been able to first hand see how this leadership organization works – and hands down, it’s been nothing but complete success.
Here’s the thing you need to take away from this: place people on your team who are better at their craft than you. Hire creative geniuses. Get musicians on your team that absolutely blow your mind. Find people who are better than you. You need to be the administrative creative. They need to have serious, serious talent with humility to follow your direction.
With this structure of handling a team of artists, you’re setting up your team for massive creative success. In the next segment of the CRAFT series, we will take a look at how to take this organizational structure and push your creative development to a whole new level.
